SEX GAME AND MONEY

A woman posted an ad on Craigslist, offering a certain something for some quick cash in her game of choice, WoW. And she got what she wanted.

Someone at the Pointless Waste of Time forums posted links to the beginning and the end of the tale. The story goes as follows. An anonymous female WoW player, wanting to get her Epic Mount (in more ways than one, haw haw), put up an ad on Craigslist, including her picture and her offer.

The offer? 5,000 gold for the chance to have sex with her. And not surprisingly, someone took her up on it and apparently made her a very satisfied customer. This raises a number of questions.

First of all, is this prostitution? Sure seems like it, although MMO money isn't entirely established as legally worth real money yet, even if people buy and sell it all the time. Which leads to the second question: can she be arrested for this? This one small, funny incident marks an interesting point in the emerging virtual life that will one day be integral to everyone's day-to-day activities.

Was it good for you?

We've already got real life crimes motivated by virtual interactions. Will virtual crimes one day be treated like real crimes? Particularly with WoW gold approaching equality with real dollars, won't the theft and manufacturing of it become a problem? As the saying goes, "Time is money," and this woman has shown that. She didn't want to waste tons of time farming gold to get her Epic Mount, so she provided a service to get it

.

Is it a sad state of affairs if a woman is willing to prostitute herself for the ability to have more fun in a videogame, or is it merely a natural progression of the real world bleeding into the virtual one?

|